Indigenous knowledge for enhancing community resilience: An experience from the south-western coastal region of Bangladesh

Abstract

Traditional lifestyle of depending on the natural process, without trying to altering it, is close to the recent idea of sustainability which refers to an attempt to interlink and emulate natural processes with human activities. The Western-Euro-centric notions of science and scientific knowledge and technologies usually open opportunities to control natural processes with infrastructures to maximize economic benefits. Emphasis on short-term economic growth through the option of controlling or altering natural processes may hinder community resilience, referred as ability to resist, adapt with and recover from negative and devastating impacts of any natural process.Through employing oral history methodology in a case from Bangladesh, this article investigate the consequences of incorporating Western-Euro-centric scientific knowledge and traditional practices based on indigenous knowledge for managing water resources and resulted impacts on community flood resilience. In this case, to protect the lands from seasonal inundation, structural interventions were implemented and it resulted an environmental disaster, where cultivable lands and settlements got suffered from prolonged drainage congestion and water-logging problem. The problem was resulted due to some donor funded interventions on the river system since sixties with construction of polders/enclosures, utilizing Western-Euro-centric knowledge, which de-linked the floodplain wetlands from rivers. Whereas, indigenous approach of managing the tidal waves with temporary structures was scientifically proved its suitability to make those areas free from drainage congestion and water-logging problem. The article ends with a conclusion that, to get a resilient community, we need to combine the benefits of indigenous knowledge and modern technological solutions.